Sheet material is often provided in a disordered, not aligned form. For example, when paying in bank notes, larger quantities of bank notes are collected in cassettes, the bank notes not being put together to bundles that are aligned along edges of the bank notes. Such cassettes are referred to as free-fall cassettes. The bank notes are put into the cassette, for example, through an input opening, without depositing the bank notes in the cassette being guided in any fashion. The result is a disordered pile of bank notes, the bank notes not having any alignment to each other.
It is known to remove disordered piles of bank notes, as they are occurring for example in free-fall cassettes, from the free-fall cassettes, to align them manually along edges of the bank notes, and to form bundles. The bank notes provided in the form of bundles then, for example, can be processed with bank note processing machines, e.g. in order to be able to sort the bank notes according to currency, denomination, state etc.
But when the alignment for bundling up the bank notes provided as a disordered pile is carried out in a known fashion, this has the disadvantage that it is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. In addition, high costs for the processing required for aligning the disordered bank notes arise thereby.
Therefore, it is the problem of the present invention to provide an apparatus for aligning disordered sheet material, which aligns the disordered sheet material fast, reliable and cost-effective, so that the sheet material can be formed into bundles.